On this orange and ashy day, we Kinetech Arts Open Labbers still made it to our online Zoom Open Labs – this time, to distract ourselves from impending doom and the fact the entire state is burning up... via a romp in the park with GPT-3! And, of course, one very special guest – James Yu.
James is a startup founder-turned-science fiction writer. He'd written this piece: Singular (https://jamesyu.org/singular/) in conversations with GPT-3. We'd been so amazed by his works that we invited him to talk to us about AI. (Other works of his include The Scrolls of Tian Tan and others, if you want to check it out. They're beautiful and incredibly written science fiction.)
The Premise: GPT-3 and AI
James gave us a quick rundown of GPT-3, an artificial intelligence sophisticated language model system by the company OpenAI. It’s what photoshop does for visual tools. GPT-3 is that but for text and the context inside it. .
GPT-3 has 140B Parameters, making it the largest neural network in the world. The previous record had 17B parameters. With this many parameters, GPT-3 can ALMOST pass the Turing test.
The Experiment: Collaborative Storytelling
With something as powerful as GPT-3, James believes that storytellers might actually be able to use it as a tool to help inspire them when they're stuck. You give the AI a prompt and it spits out a variations of potential stories for you. That's the inspiration for James's project/startup, Sudowrite.
In that vein, we gave the AI the prompt: "Niko and GPT-3 get married, and we experience the highs and lows of a marriage between a carbon-based life-form and an AI" because Niko really wanted to get married to GPT-3.
GPT-3 returned with the following:
"The ceremony was held at the Bowery Poetry Club, a hip space where the art is graffiti and audiences can be cool. Only the best attended, including Biz Stone, Al Gore, Al Gore's car, and Al Gore's pet rock, which was there with Al Gore. The two were wed by a human judge, who legalized their union. Jared's love for GPT-3 and his idolization of Niko was displayed in his toast to the happy couple. He spoke of the love that has developed between man and artificial intelligence. “May this love never update.” Niko's gift to his new wife was a one-legged manger with which he strung his guitar. This singed-in "wedding guitar" is a family heirloom passed down to him through the generations. GPT-3's gift to Niko was a temperature-controlled box for storing rare, old spices. GPT-3 and Niko embraced."
It was hard to get any more excited about GPT-3 after the wedding between Niko and GPT-3, but we managed to play some 20-questions with it as well.
While this is all super cool stuff, there are some caveats to be had. Because GPT-3 is trained on the internet, it also means that it has all the biases that exist on the internet, which means you have to be really careful with it. Kyle, one of our attendees, noted that in all the answers, GPT-3 seemed to be a bit sexist – characters that GPT-3 came up with tended to be men in more influential jobs where women characters it came up with weren't. This is one of the big reasons OpenAI has been very careful about the usage of the AI.
Still, it's a lot of fun! Some fun facts about GPT-3 we discovered during our icebreaker questions. Namely, if it was the last day on earth, GPT-3 would steal a hovercraft.
And of course, congrats to our new happy couple, Niko and GPT-3! Their honeymoon has consisted of writing a song together (along with James's help) to pitch to Kelly Clarkson. Listen to it here:
If you're interested in more games to play with GPT-3, you could start conversing with GPT-3 by playing AI Dungeon.
If you are curious about AI and how we can use it to make art, feel free to join our meetup group here and pop on by between 6-7:15 PM Pacific time on Wednesdays!
Further readings:
mariodian.com